'Keeping Going', Seamus Heaney (Critical Essay‪)‬

There are so many things to say about 'Keeping Going' that it is difficult to know where to begin. The poem can be seen as an intimate, almost private salute to a member of the author's family circle; as a meditation on the relationship between childhood and adulthood and on the role of memory in sustaining that relationship; as an exercise in colloquialism so insistent as to merit the term 'experimental'; as a reflection on the seductiveness and limitations of poetry itself; as an adroit negotiation--at once respectful and resistant--of the influence on his own practice of his reading in canonical English literature and in the work of his senior poetic contemporaries; as a celebration of the quiet, desperate tenacity that carried ordinary Northern Irish people through the worst years of the Troubles; and as a more or less covert commentary on the demand for fortitude and renewal (psychological and formal) his calling places upon a writer who considers himself to be only as good as his next poem. One of the most striking features of 'Keeping Going' is its success in connecting these concerns so that they appear to be aspects of each other rather than disparate topics. If the poem's own witness is to be believed, 'Keeping Going' had its origins in memories of the childhood habit of the poet's brother Hugh of referring to sporrans as whitewash brushes and in a recollection of a particular occasion on which he jestingly used a whitewash brush as a sporran and an inverted kitchen chair as a make-believe set of bagpipes. Rather than being relayed directly to the reader, however, the recollection is filtered through another poem, Hugh MacDiarmid's 'Lament for the Great Music'. Heaney's opening line 'The piper coming from far away is you' wittily de-romanticizes the two-line concluding verse paragraph of MacDiarmid's long (657 lines), meditative mosaic on the lost art of the MacCrimmons, hereditary pipers to Macleod of Macleod on the Isle of Skye: